TGS 2006: Pilot Academy

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The PSP takes flight with this handheld flying game.

By Nix

Last year at TGS, we were bored silly with the flight sims shown for the PSP -- all literally flight "simulators", with less concentration on the joy of flight and more focus on the accuracy of traveling in wide-open air with nothing to do but read the meters. The most exciting gameplay of any of last year's flight sims was the slow crawl of a passenger airliner coming in for a landing.

Pilot Academy is more of a flight sim than the action-based Ace Combat, with a huge variety of real planes to fly, most without guns or missiles. Still, it's not meant to be a dull flying game, instead modeling itself after PilotWings, complete with ring-flying challenges in prop planes and some tricky simulated challenges that might face real pilots. Control in the game is very simple, with the analog nub responding well for flight controls and your options for control on the buttons. This wasn't the most visually exciting game on the show floor -- its draw distance was incredibly long but still had mountains fading or popping into view artificially, and play was slow as is natural to a real flight game -- but its sense of scale and realistic proportions for modeling the world did a little better than Ace Combat in rendering correct scale and in allowing you to swoop down to the surface of the Earth for real flight fans not looking for combat sim gameplay.

Pilot Academy should be on shelves here in Japan soon, and a European release has already been committed to but not fully scheduled.